by Damon Galgut
‘I’ll tell her.’
I hovered for another second, unsure how to leave. He suddenly leaned forward and took hold of my wrist with a strong but soft grip. ‘Listen,’ he said, apparently friendly, ‘I didn’t mean to offend you just now.’
‘How? When? I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Yes, you do. With what I said about... him. The man on television.’
‘Oh, that. I wasn’t offended.’
‘I hope not. I didn’t mean anything bad. I’m not a racist. I just have certain views, I see the world in a particular way. But I’m not a racist. I have no problem with your mother’s friend, for example. You can invite him for a drink too, no problem.’
‘I’ll tell him,’ I said. ‘But I’m sure he won’t come.’
He let go of my wrist. ‘As long as you understand.’
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye, Patrick Winter. Goodbye.’
In the painful, gory business of ending their marriage, my parents had done a lot of fighting. All the pent-up poisons had come to the surface and burst out. A lot of ugly things had been said, some of them true. I had lain in bed and heard them going at each other downstairs, night after night. The sound of breaking glass is forever bound up in my mind with the smashing of more delicate things.
None of this went on now with Godfrey, though this was, in its way, my mother’s most significant relationship since leaving my father. But in the days that followed that loud argument, I knew that she was shedding it, or him. It was a cold leaving. Like a noble cause she’d taken on too passionately, he had begun to pall in her eyes. She wouldn’t admit it at the time, but I could see it in the way she spoke to him, in the way she responded when he touched her. He wasn’t an idea any more; he was too real.
Later she told me: ‘It was all the rhetoric that did it. I just couldn’t bear it. It tired me.’
‘You said that was what you loved about him. You said he cared deeply about things.’
‘He’s so young.’
‘You liked that too.’
‘And he was so rough. In bed, you know. I need a little tenderness, I need to be held. It was the latent violence,’ she announced, with enormous conviction. ‘It frightened me.’
I didn’t go on, though I could have. ‘You found that attractive too,’ I could have said. ‘You told me you liked being treated like an object, white men were so tame and weak... ’
There was no point. She changed her positions the way she changed her clothes, and she didn’t care to remember how she’d felt in the past. At the time I was sorry for Godfrey. I thought he had no idea of what was coming. Now I think he did know; I think he didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of being hurt.
The morning after the fight and our drive out to the Moon Landscape, I went into their room. Godfrey was downstairs, having breakfast. My mother, wrapped in a kikoi, was brushing her hair at the mirror. I sat next to her on the stool, pressed up close as we’d used to sit when I was young. But years had passed, and there was grey now in her hair, and my face wasn’t smooth and empty any more.
‘Tell me about Godfrey,’ I said.
She hadn’t expected this question. She put the brush down. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Where does he come from?’
‘A little town somewhere north. I forget the name.’
‘When did he come to Windhoek?’
‘A few years ago. He came to study. The academy gave him a scholarship, or he wouldn’t have been able to afford it. His background is very poor, that I do know. His father is dead, so he brought his mother to the city with him. But you saw how they live.’
‘Why did he do drama?’
‘I don’t know, really. I’ve wondered about that too. I think he meant to do it just as a filler in first year, but then he discovered he liked it.’ She nudged me. ‘All these questions.’
‘And his politics? Where does he get it from – his anger... ?’
‘Oh, God, I don’t know. With a background like that, wouldn’t you want to change things... ?’ Something about this disturbed her; she picked up the brush again and began pulling it through her hair. ‘Patrick, I want to get dressed. I’ll see you downstairs.’
I wasn’t sure myself where these questions were coming from, but I was interested in Godfrey – more interested than I’d been in any of my mother’s other lovers. Maybe more interested than I’d ever been in my father. When I got downstairs he was already finished breakfast and was heading out the door. ‘Where are you off to?’ I said.
‘For a walk on the beach. Want to come?’
I was hungry, but I went along. The sand was stained blackly with oil, but it was good to be standing at this point where three deserts converged: the land, the ocean, the sky. The noise of the waves filled up the silence, so that the lack of conversation wasn’t awkward.
After a long pause, he said, ‘I’d better get going. I have a lot to do.’
‘What?’
‘Well, the rally. The funeral service. I have to organize everything.’
‘Is it a rally or a funeral service? They don’t sound like the same thing.’
He gave a snorting laugh. ‘In politics, it is often the same thing. Death and freedom, two sides of the struggle.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let’s go back. My mother will be wondering where we are anyway.’
But we didn’t move. Something kept us standing there, shoes in hand, the white water roiling and dragging round our feet. After another long silence I said to him:
‘You shouldn’t treat her badly. You should take care how you speak to her.’
I had meant this as good advice: a way of keeping her. But he stiffened, and I saw he’d understood me differently. He thought I was telling him what to do.
‘It’s part of my culture,’ he said. ‘Women don’t answer men back.’
‘It’s part of your culture you should think about changing.’
He made an impatient sound with his mouth and wagged a forefinger at me. ‘Always forcing us to change our culture. Always your way. Always the white way.’
I blushed. ‘That wasn’t what I meant. I was just trying to talk to you. Not all black people – just you.’
But he didn’t seem to hear. There was a sizzle of underlying anger in his voice, perhaps the remnants of his argument with my mother. ‘White people,’ he said. ‘You make me laugh. You’re so concerned with yourselves. Your own little lives. You have no nation. Just people. You’re so... ’
‘What? Selfish?’
‘Ja. Introspective. Neurotic – you’re neurotic. Look at you, for example. You’re in love with your mother.’
I was stung and speechless for a second. Then I said, ‘Well, so are you.’ It was a useless reply, but it was the only one that came to me.
It turned out to be the best answer, because in a moment he started laughing. He roared and slapped his stomach. The tension between us, which was about to turn into ugliness – an ugliness, I now think, that was always somehow just below the surface between the three of us through those days – folded inside out and became something else, something innocuous and innocent. We were just two young men talking on the beach. He came closer to me and put one arm around my shoulders. ‘Let’s go back,’ he said. ‘You’re right, your mother will be waiting.’
My mother said she had a headache and wanted to rest in the room. So Godfrey and I went out alone. We drove to the SWAPO office where I had sat on the kerb the morning before, watching the town come to life. We parked outside the butchery, where yesterday the pigs had been hanging in the window, and went in and up to the first floor.
The office was smallish and open plan, washed through with light. There was a great deal of activity – people writing or talking on the telephone. They were happy to see Godfrey; there was a lot of hand-slapping and chatter. He didn’t introduce me to anybody, but I was accepted as a background detail to his life that didn’t need to be exp
lained. I followed him to a back office with a telephone where he was apparently to conduct his business. Somebody brought us mugs of coffee. I sat and watched while he made a few calls, feeling both near and very far from all of this. I was, I think, a little in love by then.
Then he got up, just as abruptly as he’d sat down, and jerked his head at me to indicate that we were leaving. I scurried along in his wake, back down the stairs to the car. Some of the people from upstairs had been loading up the boot with banners and ropes and what looked like part of a podium. Now we drove out on the road I’d taken with my mother yesterday. But we didn’t go far: just to the edge of the township, where the desert took over. There was a sort of natural arena, a shallow basin of sand, ringed on the far side with the first high dunes. It was obvious that this was where most communal activity in the township took place: there were improvised goalposts for soccer, and a fair amount of rubbish lying around. But it was shaping up now for the rally or service that was taking place later. There was a half-built podium, and somebody was hanging bunting around it. A loudspeaker was already in place. I could see a generator nearby and electric cables lying like random cracks in the earth.
I was a little lost here. I’d come along to help, but nobody asked me to do anything. Godfrey ignored me completely. In a minute or two he was off somewhere, helping with putting up some kind of barrier, and I was left to wander aimlessly through the little crowd. There were a lot of children and idlers from the township, come to watch what was happening, and I became one of them. It wasn’t a bad role to play.
It took me a while to notice the one other white person present, a woman a bit older than me, sitting up near the crest of a dune, her knees close to her chin, arms hugging her legs. She didn’t seem fascinated by the little scene unfolding below her; she seemed, if anything, to be wishing it away. I went closer to her by degrees, wandering in random loops nearer to the bottom of the dune, but if I’d hoped she’d notice me she gave no sign. Eventually I cast aside my shyness and made a direct approach, up the face of the dune. It turned out to be a long climb, the sand crunching and squeaking under my feet, and I was gasping by the time I neared the top. She still hadn’t looked directly at me.
I sat down next to her. The view was surprisingly impressive, all human figures in it reduced to ciphers. I said to her, ‘Are you coming tonight?’
She didn’t answer. I turned my head to look at her. From close, her little triangular face was dark. She was quite pretty, with thin curved eyebrows, a long narrow nose pierced with a stud. But there was something colourless about her, a hollowness that chimed with something in me. I felt as if I knew her, though I’d never met her before. I said:
‘Did you know him?’
Tonelessly, she said, ‘He was my boyfriend.’
‘I’m sorry.’
She nodded. ‘So am I,’ she said. After a moment a tear broke free from one eye and ran down her cheek, but that was the only visible reaction.
‘I didn’t know him,’ I said, then felt stupid for saying it. There was no reason for me to be here, interrupting her grief, but I felt as if I wanted something, some answer or acknowledgement I couldn’t give words to. ‘But Godfrey, my mother’s friend, he knew him. That’s Godfrey down there.’
Now she did turn to look at me. Her eyes were greenish, but they seemed almost black. ‘Please... ’ she said. She meant, please go away, please leave me alone.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘I’ll leave now. But I just wanted to say, I wish I was like him, I wish I was more like him.’
There were other words behind these ones, a confession straining to be made, but it couldn’t come out. If I could have spoken I might have said something like this: your lover who died was all that I’ll never be. Though I strain and I beat, my efforts are muffled, my cries are eaten by silence. I have longed for a way to vent my country from me, to bawl it out of my head. Andrew Lovell was my other impossible self. Instead I smiled thinly at her and got up and went back down the dune, staggering in the thick sand, trying not to look back.
When I got down to the bottom Godfrey was waiting for me. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’d better go back and shower.’
My mother wasn’t in the room. I went downstairs, through the foyer, to look for her. It was by chance that I went into the bar; I knew, after all, that she wouldn’t be there; but she was there, and she wasn’t alone.
She was at the counter, a glass in hand, backlit by green light. At the moment I came in she was laughing, her head thrown back, exposing her throat – a pose of wanton abandon, so apparently free that perhaps only I could see how tightly twisted her legs were around the base of the stool. It took me a moment to move past her, but I knew already, in some prescient hollow under my heart, what I would see: the khaki clothes, the hairy whorled knees, the brown hat with a strip of leopard-skin tied around it. He touched two fingers to his temple in a mock salute and called: ‘Patrick! You said you’d have a drink today!’
My mother swung around, her eyes bright with unintelligent excitement. ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘how are you? How was your day at the office?’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘We were setting up for the rally.’
‘You didn’t tell me you’d met Mr Blaauw.’
‘He can call me Dirk.’
‘I forgot,’ I said.
‘What can I get you?’
‘Nothing right now. I have to go and shower. We have to get ready.’
‘I’ll be along in a minute, I just have to finish this gin and tonic. I’ve had a wonderful day. I went to the beach. I went to the shops. Look at this little bottle I found in town.’ She delved into her handbag and brought out a blue glass bottle. I remembered it immediately from the German shop, the one where all the swastikas and SS swords were. It was part of the collection of everyday objects that had been distorted by the desert. ‘Isn’t it amazing? Look at the shape.’
‘I see it.’
She picked up something in my tone and looked at me reproachfully. ‘Are you cross because I didn’t come along today? You don’t resent me having one day off, do you?’ She looked at Dirk Blaauw and rolled her eyes. ‘Children,’ she said. ‘I’m supposed to be here for a holiday, and they get upset if you take even one day off.’
He laughed with immoderate heartiness, as if she’d been incredibly witty.
‘But we aren’t here on holiday,’ I said.
I’d spoken levelly, but she flinched, as if I’d shouted. ‘Of course we are,’ she said. ‘What did you think?’
‘Have a drink,’ he said again.
‘No, thanks. I’m going to shower.’ I walked across the room to the door and turned back to look. But they’d already forgotten I was there. Their heads had drawn together again in smiling collusion above the strange blue bottle.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘I’ve never dug a grave before.’
‘You’ll dig a lot more in your life. Anyway, it’s not a grave.’
I had blisters on my hands. I paused to wipe sweat off my forehead and lifted the spade again. Godfrey was watching me, hands on hips, like a feudal overlord. Like a white master in my own country.
He was right: it wasn’t a grave; it was just a little hole in the desert. We had come a bit early to the place where the rally was being held that night so that we could make this one preparation. Andrew Lovell had been cremated, and it was his express wish that his ashes be scattered in the desert. But Godfrey had decided that half of the ashes would be interred here, at the height of the rally, as a symbolic gesture.
My mother was perched on a stone nearby. She was wearing a blue scarf, which the wind had unpicked and stretched out behind her. Her mood was heavy and preoccupied, as though she had nothing to do with the two of us and our bizarre activity in the sand.
And it was true that we felt ourselves separate to her, as though she was a figure off in the distance to one side. Godfrey and I were aware of each other in a heightened way, but it was a feeling we could not
put words to. In any event, what this meant to him was different, I was sure, to the meaning it had for me. For him this was some kind of perverse political lesson he was teaching; he had given me the spade to dig with as though this whole rally was for me.
‘That’s enough,’ he said. ‘That’s deep enough.’
He turned away, looking suddenly bored. A few other people were arriving now, drifting in out of the lowering gloom. The SWAPO flag was snapping on a pole nearby. I wandered off, looking for a place to leave the spade. In the end I took it back to the car.
It felt to me that I wasn’t dressed for the occasion. It never had become clear whether this was a rally or a funeral, but my temperament inclined me towards the ritual around the ashes and the hole in the ground. I had tried to find dark clothing, but I wasn’t prepared. I had to make do with jeans and a grey shirt. But when we’d left the hotel I saw that Godfrey had made no attempt to dress soberly. He was also wearing jeans, and a T-shirt of marching black workers under a red banner that said, NAMIBIA! ONE NATION! Now I saw that the people coming in from all directions were also dressed in bright colours that spoke of celebration rather than mourning. I had to remind myself that this country was on the verge of renewal and regeneration, and the temptation to grieve belonged more properly to where I came from.
‘Oh, would you look at that sky,’ my mother said. ‘The colours are absolutely perfect.’
She had wandered over to me. I knew her moods well enough to sense her petulant alienation. I remembered the first few times she’d been to political rallies in South Africa, the demented fervour with which she’d described them. All the shouting and marching and rage – it was like the lid coming off her own life. But now the intensity had gone out of it for her; she was watching it from outside; she was lonely and bored.
‘Let’s go up that dune,’ she said, ‘and watch the sun going down.’
It was the same dune that Andrew Lovell’s girlfriend had been sitting on. We climbed it by the same route, a laborious slog up the front face. By the time we got to the top the sun was resting on the horizon, a ball on a flat line. Almost immediately it was disappearing, sucked down behind the world, but my mother was right: the colours it left behind were perfect. The sky was a molten mess of reds and blues and pinks. Down at the bottom of the dune the shadows were complete. But a generator roared somewhere, and floodlights stuttered into life; in a moment we were looking down into a bowl of blue light. People were pouring in now, streaming in on foot from the township nearby, but down the road a steady line of cars was approaching and parking. All of this activity and arrival felt somehow centred on that little hole I’d dug half an hour ago.